Words matter. These are the best Daniel Alarcon Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I like radio because you can do an hour-long interview and then three days later have a finished piece.
I think probably the thing I’m worst at is the most ephemeral stuff, like blogs. I find it really hard to write. And I’m often been asked to write columns for papers in Peru. And I can’t. I would die. There’s no way I could write a column.
When I started writing seriously in high school, English was the language I had at my disposal – my Spanish was domestic, colloquial, and not particularly literary or sophisticated.
I think I’m an American writer writing about Latin America, and I’m a Latin American writer who happens to write in English.
I’m a sucker for any band named after a work of literature. Los de Abajo take their name from Mariano Azuela’s famous novel ‘The Underdogs,’ and that says a lot about who they are and the music they make.
The impact of any particular writer on your own work is hard to discern.
I do feel fortunate to have some knowledge of the great Latin American writers, including some that are probably not that well known in English. I’m thinking of Jose Maria Arguedas, whom I read when I was living in Lima, and who really impacted the way I viewed my country.
For fiction, I’m not particularly nationalistic. I’m not like the Hugo Chavez of Latin American letters, you know? I want people to read good work.
I love to walk through the streets of Jesus Maria and Pueblo Libre. The Spanish colonial buildings are in bright colors, two stories high, with these intricate wooden, windowed balconies.
As a boy, I wanted to be the Peruvian Diego Maradona. Sadly, Peru hasn’t made the World Cup since 1982, so I guess I did well to choose something different.
Peru is a country where more than half the people would emigrate if given the chance. That’s half the population that is willing to abandon everything they know for the uncertainty of a life in a foreign land, in another language.
I began visiting Lima’s prisons back in 2007, when my first novel, ‘Lost City Radio,’ was published in Peru.
I love the novel because it’s like a love affair. You can just fall into it and keep going, and you never know where it’s going to take you.
Writing a novel is not at all like riding a bike. Writing a novel is like having to redesign a bike, based on laws of physics that you don’t understand, in a new universe. So having written one novel does nothing for you when you have to write the second one.
I write in English because I was raised in the States and educated in this language.
It’s true that there are people who live the idea of being an artist, as opposed to the idea of making art.
How emigration is actually lived – well, this depends on many factors: education, economic station, language, where one lands, and what support network is in place at the site of arrival.
